Today on Learning Day, we’re looking at a book called How to Dominate Women. Regular 1900hotdoggers might be asking, “How to Dominate Women? Why isn’t this book being looked at on Fucking Day?” I’ll tell you why: because whoever wrote this book has never been laid in his life. This book is a eulogy to the crankiest man’s shriveled genitals. If you found a baby at the bottom of a pool and asked its remains to write a book on swimming, the first draft of its manuscript would be more helpful than How to Dominate Women.
The author, Gary Brodsky, has published many more books on picking up women. One uses charm, one uses mind control, one uses CIA black-op tactics, and three use actual magic. And if you’re trying to use sorcery to get pussy, you’re not doing it because your fun and engaging personality worked. He’s also published one book that is literally tips for sociopaths trying to get revenge, so I guess when Gary Brodsky gets this Google alert I need to watch out for a lonely elderly man trying to key my car.
Here are some of Gary’s greatest hits, and this might shock you, but all of them are self-published. There’s almost a sadness to someone putting this much work into a career that made no one any money and helped zero people. On the other hand, Gary Brodsky’s desperate fantasy is that magic is real and you should use it for sexual assault. The only thing Gary seems competent at is making sure every single book he publishes, no matter what the subject matter, immediately looks like the self-published book of a madman. Does every lunatic saving their manifesto to pdf know the same graphic designer?
How to Dominate Women was written in 2002, around the same time teen pregnancy dropped dramatically in the U.S.. I’m not saying they are related, but I honestly don’t know how to study how well a book on crushing ass works. Spend a lifetime being Gary Brodsky and then compare numbers with a different ugly guy to see if he can top three, five if you count hand stuff, and one of them was half-Blonde?
The book starts by declaring women your enemy, which isn’t a healthy way to start a relationship, but it does help dehumanize them. And dehumanizing women is a necessary step if your main move is going to be rubbing your balls on them until one finally says, “I’m going to let you keep doing this and also not call the police.”
I should also mention Gary sort of fancies himself the Tim Allen of disco lurkers. So, yes, he would absolutely force a woman to have sex with him using any means real or imaginary, and writes books explicitly stating this, but it’s all obscured with what he thinks is just enough irony. He also thinks modern men should get a lot more credit for how easily cavemen could beat up cavewomen, but weirdly enough, I don’t think he’s joking during that part.
Now, dominators, let’s get into the goddamn domination.
The thing that’s great about Gary is he yada-yadas his way through something as immensely complicated as introducing yourself to the woman you’re stalking, making her comfortable, and keeping her attention. By the nature of what you’re doing and the books you read, this will be almost impossible, but Gary is like, “Okay, you got this, let’s skip to the part where she’s taking off her panties.” And then the part that’s deadass simple, not letting her make decisions, Gary repeats and repeats. It’s a perfect example of his mentality– attack every crotch like a Soviet propagandist and good things are sure to happen.
Let’s see more of his tactics in action!
Gary once again skips past how to get a girl’s number to get to the part where you psychologically abuse her with it. He’s literally berating the reader for not being rude enough to a fictional girl in this cliche gambit to damage her self esteem. This reveals two things about Gary: his best case scenario is a girl who is so fragile she “will begin to become frenzied” after the creepiest man she ever gave her number to is 30 minutes late calling. I worry such a woman doesn’t exist, and if she does, she’s already been snatched up by the horny pervert who called her at 9:29.
The other thing it reveals about Gary is he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You can disagree on the effectiveness of his tactics, but when the second chapter in your book on lady domination is about waiting to call her back, and you seem to think you both invented the idea and that it makes you awesome, you’re legally a fucking idiot. Good or bad, there’s no pickup tip more basic than that. That was a tired trope in ’80s sitcoms. Our great-grandfathers didn’t call our great-grandmothers back to try to lower their self esteem enough for casual sex. Quakers on the Mayflower delayed correspondence to frenzy their potential lovers, Gary. You dumbass, no pussy-getting sack of paper-thin confidence.
There are, no bullshit, eight more pages explaining the concept of not calling a girl back. Gary has all the wisdom of someone outwitting an unlimited toppings salad bar who has never eaten or met a salad. Let’s move on to the third chapter, which is called THE SEDUCTIVE APPROACH: WALKING THE WALK/TALKING THE TALK.
When all you do is stay inside and type books about how you would fuck chicks if you had magic, you can sort of create any world view you want. And Gary, for some reason, fantasizes about a world where super hot girls go for ugly ass “big-eared bananas.”
In Gary’s fantasy world, for some reason, money has nothing to do with a lady’s choice in men. He does argue against himself to bring up how women are shallow, money-grabbing subhumans, but the first Gary easily wins the argument by ignoring the second Gary and the final decision is clear: the ugly, broke men with the beautiful women have something going for them other than looks or money. What could it be!? C-clothes? Is it maybe stylish clothes and cologne?
Oh shit, I was way off. So Gary’s secret is… your approach. This must be, like, an attitude that governs all your decisions and interactions… a coolness in everything you do. I guess that makes sense.
Wait, wait, holy fucking shit. When Gary said approach he meant, like, a person’s physical approach!? This chapter called “WALKING THE WALK” is about actual walking!? Does Gary think these hot girls are following ugly guys around because they once entered a room with the perfect amount of aloofness?
I can’t… I know this guy has been wrong before, but could it really be that simple?
Update: It was. Seven minutes of strut practice and I fucked fucking everything. End of article.
Pick two words to describe yourself. Ha, I can do it in three: THE HUNK BOAT.
No matter how full and adventurous your life has been up to this moment, this is the hardest you’ve ever seen five pairs of panties struggle to contain penises. These thongs are each a sarcastic response to whoever asked these hunks to cover themselves. They look like what a maitre d makes you wear at a restaurant that requires underpants. I’ve named these hunks Burt Mustang, Tabasco, Jersey Chicago, Wetfuck Wentworth, and Fauxbio only because I think it would really hurt their feelings if I referred to them by the color of the speedos these naturally nude beefcakes are furious to be wearing. Let’s check out the back of the box.
Yes! On the back these hunks can party! There they all nakedly are– Buns Mustang, Coy Penetration, and the Triplets– Moist 1, Moist 2, and Chance Saturday: Tampa’s Nudest Boy ’94. Let’s stop here and make one thing clear: I love naming hunks. And I’m looking forward to seeing if this video really is 90 minutes of ordinary outdoor activities done with flopping dongs. Because it says in the copy they are hot fraternity brothers? So these hunks aren’t even going to fuck? Who is this for? People who think outdoor sports videos have too much product placement? Ladies with sunburn fetishes? Gay men who get off on watching struggling straight models perform homoerotic material for a few hundred dolla– wait, that’s the one. I figured it out.
This is going to really annoy that demographic I just mentioned, but I ran into an issue with THE HUNK BOAT.
THE HUNK BOAT VHS only made some unpleasant, yet still hunky, clunking sounds in my VCR. Maybe 25 years of service is too much to ask of a nude man, or maybe this tape’s previous owner wore it the fuck out, but it’s fine. I actually have some hunky 1900HOTDOG stuff to talk about anyway. So let’s put away our throbbing sex parts and switch this up to a…
After four months it’s legally accurate to call our upstart hilarity enterprise a success! After a few rich people passed ownership of Cracked.com around until there was no one left working there, Brockway and I set out to create a place where jokes could thrive. I’m obviously a true wonder, sure, but Brockway consistently makes me laugh out-loudedly several times a week. I’m always impressed with his creative decisions, word choice, and absurd, almost self-destructive work ethic. His tirelessness made me into a man who hates Mario Lopez, and I’m so much happier now.
Together, as of this writing, we have posted one hundred and fucking twenty two articles on this site which is goddamn crazy. Especially since I designed this format so we could post every day about a single inspiringly ridiculous thing– you know, like a few fun paragraphs and silly pictures, and we never do that. Over the course of 122 articles, neither one of us has evermanaged to avoid writing 2000 word punchline-dense epics. Deep in our souls we cannot allow readers to say, “Ha, this man found a book about having sex on the toilet,” when they could instead be saying, “Dear god, this madman wrote too many jokes about toilet sseee– I’M CUMMING!”
Because of this, and how people don’t read comedy websites on the weekends, we are switching to a five day only format. We will still regularly do the weekend bits Teamworking Days and Reflecting Days, but they will be mixed in among the standard five aspects of the hot dog: Learning, Punching, Nerding, Fucking, and Upsetting. I assure you it will still be way too many jokes about toilet sex and every one of them will be targeting your erogenous zones.
I should also mention that outrageous 122 article number doesn’t include five hilarious pieces from our old Cracked friends Jason “David Wong” Pargin and Chris Bucholz, and one from the very producer of our podcast’s theme song, Auralnauts Zak. Which, speaking of, we have a podcast now. We just recorded our first episode using technology more advanced than a VCR filled with HUNK BOAT, but just as determined to malfunction, so once we sort out a couple audio issues, look for The Dogg Zzone: The Official 1-900-HOTDOG Podcast wherever you get that type of thing.
One of the things you officially become after you do 100 somethings is data. And after four and a half months of hot dogging, we can look at what we’ve done and truly know ourselves. These are the 1-900-HOTDOG Official Content Stats:
As any data scientist can plainly see, I (the red boxes) focus mainly on learning new things, smut, Karate, and deranged books that defy reasonable classification. Brockway (the blue boxes) has more approachable interests like movies, TV shows, and cartoons. But together, we are a diverse and unstoppable force for comedy.
Brockway: Fuck it, it’s now also Teamworking Day! There are no rules and if you build any before us we will karate chop them in half like tender plywood, or the fool standing between Steven Seagal and whatever is on the Craft Services table for the traitorous propaganda he’s filming now. Subway? My guess is Subway. Seems like a traitor’s sandwich. Hey speaking of shitty karate, have I really written that little about shitty karate? Have I really written more about games than Seanbaby? It makes sense to me that he’s so far ahead in books, since Sean has the most cursed library this side of The Magic Tree House. See, that’s the kind of dumb joke I make about books, which is why they’re normally Seanbaby territory. Well, that and the general crumbling of our whole world.
The original plan was for me to exploit the generous lunacy of the Arizona thriftstore scene to unearth my own artifacts and add to the Great Hot Dog library, but that was literally a week before the pandemic. In retrospect, perhaps it was foolish to congratulate ourselves on launch day by yelling “and who can stop us, God?” Then thunderously laughing while toasting with stolen communion wine. But the joke’s on God, because Sean has enough Books That Should Not Be to weather any apocalypse, and I have found my material on the Internet — the ultimate cursed library! We’re more successful than ever, not in spite of God’s wrath, but because of it! Hahahaha! To invincibility!
Seanbaby: Still, with all our success comes one downside. The interdimensional ad-hosting service we never signed up for but can’t remove, Poxco Global, gains more influence with every article, and they recently hired this fucking bullshit SEO strategy media consultant, Topper Goodmeadow. Topper Goodmeadow is a human menstrual belt. He is the unsupervised toddler wandering behind the cam girl farting into a balloon.
I hate Topper with all the data I am, and I’m 90% sure he’s not a bit. Brockway and I have no memory of creating him. I don’t even know what dark part of myself could defeat the good sense parts of myself to create him. Each of Topper’s wives who has sex with him should be prosecuted for performing unlicensed pap smears with hazardous waste.
Brockway: True story, I kept deleting the stretch goal to hire Topper, and every morning I’d return to not only find it there again, but that a photo of my family had been erased from my hard drive. The stretch goal to fire him is still up, but that’s only because I used our slush fund to hire an Internet Shaman.
Seanbaby: The point is, aside from Topper, and sorry for all this sincerity, I love this job and this website and I want to thank all our readers for supporting us. On that subject, we mailed out rewards for our Hot Dog Supreme patrons last month because at least 1% of my motivation for creating this website was to finally, at long last free myself from these terrible cursed artifacts from my library. Here’s what beloved author and developer Jeff Atwood said when he received his!
Jeff now knows 100 ways to kill you plus one more if he thinks to throw that trading card of Knight Rider’s watch at you. He thought he was just supporting comedy, but now he’s also a walking time bomb– that’s the 1-900-HOTDOG promise. Another satisfied reader, Nick, is now haunted by the copy of MARTIAL DANCE that terrorized my bookshelf lo these many years. He posted this in our Discord and has not been heard from since.
Brockway: I’m so happy to be working with Sean. No, Seanbaby. No, The Internet’s Seanbaby. Do you know how great a job is when 100% of your coworkers are Seanbaby? It is also terrifying: You’re perpetually pushed to be better, to do better, to always anticipate the next roundhouse kick, both metaphorical and devastatingly literal.
If you financially-slapdash superstars hadn’t supported this site, I don’t know where I’d be right now. That’s not true, I know exactly where I’d be: working for the sad and shambling remains of the mainstream internet, chasing obsolescence down the drain while writing the filler that goes between screencaps of stolen tweets and ‘wackily’ summarizing Reddit comments. That’s the internet writer equivalent of giving handjobs for bus passes, and I’m thankful every day I can prolong listing ‘bulk hand lotion’ as a business expense.
Seanbaby: Anyway, this sentimentality– this bullshit, heartfelt self-indulgence is what happens when my VCR won’t play a HUNK BOAT. I’m going to go respool this VHS tape and hopefully get these barely contained dick baskets in working order for next time. Thanks, everyone!
This article was made possible by Hot Dog Supremes like Mike Stiles, on whom the story “The Robot Who Fell in Love with Mike” was based, Aidan Mouat, the Patron brought to you by the new Arby’s Edible Six Cheese Sandwich Mask with Cheese, and Adrienne Hisbrook, who has gotten away with every human crime and six dog ones.
In the 1900hotdog library, there are countless books made up of total bullshit, sometimes because the author was a lying grifter and other times because they were a stupid failure. This book, My Life’s Fight: the life story of Mark Bailey, has one of each. It’s the fully fictional life of a fighter who can’t fight as told to a writer who can’t edit, fact check, or spell. By any metric, it’s the worst, most pointless book ever written.
Aside from growing up dumb, racist, and filled with drugs, Mark Bailey has never done anything. But Donna Kshir transcribed every story he told about drug deals gone wrong, prison fights, and so, so many underground world championship street combat battles. They all have the same details of Mark getting his jaw and hands broken, winning because he never gives up, then listening to doctors say he’ll never wake up from his coma. Oh, and sometimes he signs autographs for his fans before the coma. And another thing…
This book was written in 2008.
This obviously fake bullshit was published ten years after every home had access to all information in the world, and Donna Kshir sat here with the scarless, chubby survivor of three hundred street fights and twice that many comas and never thought to Google any of the 27 world titles he won. To call her a bad writer is inadequate. She’s a bad 3rd grader. She’s a chimpanzee declared too stupid to use for shampoo testing. This trusting, mitten-handed cow doesn’t know the difference between “their” and “there” and at least 40% of the book is made up of previous paragraphs clumsily rewritten with different spelling errors. If you asked her to write instructions for soup she would say, “My naybor sayd soup is invented by wizerds to de feet breakfast. Wizords com bined all their majic to kill eggs with Soup.“
I don’t want to cherry pick her worst mistakes, so to give you the fairest possible example, here’s the very first page of the book:
You probably assume Donna is simply lazy as fuck, poorly educated, and untalented in a way beyond criticism. You can’t review this as a work of writing– it’s like mocking a ransom letter for missing a comma. If a janitor wrote this, you’d fire them for being the dumbest goddamn janitor in Pennsylvania. The middle school this woman dropped out of should burn itself down in shame. But, get this, according to the Dedication, this piece of shit book fulfilled her lifelong dream. And then, as she does all fucking book, she mentions the same thing on the next page in the Acknowledgements. Do you know what this means!? I think she was trying. This 72 page pamphlet of clumsily transcribed lies as told by the dumbest goddamn liar in Pennsylvania, which neither she nor anyone proofread, was her dream.
Let’s talk a little about Mark Bailey’s entirely fabricated life story. It started like most stories do…
In his early 20s, Mark was already an International underground fight champion. He was so deadly, and everyone knew it, but people would always spit on him and then he had no choice but to choke them out with lethal choke holds no one had ever seen before. The fact that anyone, even poor Donna left behind by our education system, couldn’t see this guy was full of shit is depressing. Donna must have so, so much MLM merchandise in her reverse-mortgaged home while she raises money for her ghost investigation equipment.
Every character who passes through Mark’s life is a movie cliche. He was trained in sombo, which isn’t how you spell that, by an evil Russian named Vlad, a name which means, “I should have looked up a second Russian name before I made this character up.” When Mark finally defeated Vlad, Vlad said he was ready to go back to street fighting, the thing it was already impossible for Mark to lose at. I think Mark was still around 22 at this point, and so he sort of retired from made up fighting to get into made up drug dealing. This landed him in made up legal trouble.
His lawyer, “Mr. Smith,” told him he was going to have to go to prison for 25 years unless he snitched, but Mark Bailey doesn’t snitch. It wasn’t exactly clear on why his testimony would help them, and honestly Mark’s entire legal saga was a narrative mess. He seems to have seen maybe one TV episode about the process, but definitely not a second. Here’s how he dealt with the threat of prison:
You don’t have to be a genius to know how Mark described his first day in prison. Take a minute and try to guess what he said, and what Donna Kshir recounted breathlessly and with a bag of hammers’ understanding of punctuation.
You’re right. Within three paragraphs Mark earned the respect of the big black man who runs the place by beating him up and turning down his job offer to be him.
To be legally allowed back into grade school, her teachers had to list Donna as “class hamster” on her paperwork. I have a feeling “Kshir” isn’t her real last name; it’s just the closest she could come to spelling “Kangaroo Brain Transplant Subject H-14”
Back to Mark’s story: due to a paperwork mixup he got thrown into a prison for cancer and AIDS patients. This weird digression seemed more interesting to him than normal prison which he instantly conquered, so another paperwork mixup sent him to a prison for the criminally insane where several things he saw in movies happened. In particular, Mark talks a lot about all the rape. Every few pages it comes up and Donna is not equipped for it. She seems to not know whether the word is a verb or some kind of adnoun, and whenever Mark invents another unspeakable sex crime her sentence structure falls apart worse than usual. It’s… I don’t know, “weird” isn’t the word. I mean, sure it’s weird, but it’s more like the worst aspects of their stupidity and dishonesty are painting a masterpiece of failure. There’s nothing quite as troubling or shitty as what these two piles of garbage came together to make for zero money and the benefit of no one.
By the time Mark got out of prison he was no longer a racist and gave his life to God. So he went back to street fighting where he maimed many fictional men in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Once he fought his way back to being a world champion of the streets, again, he became a teacher. He opened a school where he taught his lethal, unorthodox martial arts techniques to children. His students entered tournaments and “sat back and laughed, walking away with the medals and swords.” And since children were winning swords in no-holds-barred grappling tournaments, I guess we can add “martial arts tournaments” to the list of things Mark Bailey doesn’t know anything about and Donna Kshir can’t Google.
Every page of this tiny, never-before-read book is a fucking disaster. Mark’s fake life is a rough draft of a screenplay called Untitled Wayans Brothers ’70s Action Movie Spoof, and Donna Kshir is lucky if she can spoon chocolate pudding into her dog’s mouth without either of them losing an eye. Once the saga of Mark Bailey gets to this child Karate section, he and Donna slop together a swamp of words I fucking dare you to make sense of:
Longtime, tastemaking Me fans might recognize Sensei Mark Bailey from a Cracked article I wrote 10 years ago called “7 Fighters Who Lied Their Way to Legendary.” In it, I condensed thousands of pages of Internet drama and police reports about Mark and six men like him into 4000 words. It was no small feat, but they took the whole thing down after one of the subjects’ lawyers threatened to sue. I wasn’t told which one, but the liar who took the number one spot, Frank Dux on whom Bloodsport was based, was also known for filing ludicrous lawsuits. I couldn’t believe the nerdy comedy website caved in so easily. To what? A superspy ninja’s famously unreasonable lawyer!? Psh.
I have good news, though! Here at 1900hotdog.com, the closest thing we have to a legal team is a People’s Court board game that smells like 40-year-old beer, so now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll just reprint the whole thing here.
So now all I need to do is find an old draft, copy edit it, reformat it, find a ten-year-old backup drive of notes and graphics, Photoshop those, then reflect on the outrageous words I remember being funny in the 2000s but look like hate crimes today. After that, it’s just several hours of followup research to find out what all these shitty men have gotten up to in the last decade, and that, aspiring comedy writers, is how you make two days of work out of a half day off!
Please re-enjoy this…
My cousin knows a guy who killed someone by touching him by using an illegal Karate move known only to fifth graders. Knowing I would one day face him I learned how to kill on the streets from Tibetan jungle sherpas. During my martial journeys I studied with these men– these legends.
John Decyk is a professional fighter who was stabbed in the knee ligament at the age of 16. Doctors said he would never walk again, but fighting legend Royce Gracie helped prove them wrong. He went on to train John to become one of the top MMA stars in the world, winning 57 fights, multiple titles and finding time to also be a Marine, firefighter, and bail recovery agent. Soon after he posted his amazing life story on Wikipedia, John “The Jam Man” Decyk also became gay, studied with the X-Men, and won at least three cheese-eating championships.
As you had to have guessed, John Decyk’s fighting career took place entirely on the World Wide Web. He didn’t know that we knew, though. He wrote long blogs about his rivalry with boxer Floyd Mayweather, who seemed to know everything about this “The Jam Man” guy and all his make-believe championships. My gut says he’s not telling the truth, but there is an outside chance John Decyk was some kind of magic fighter that only Floyd Mayweather could see.
As if they needed to, everyone did their part to bust the myth of John Decyk. Decyk fought back as hard as he could refuting every joke and fact check with another lie. It was all less than meaningless. He was like a starving man crawling away from food to get to his fake moustache. He must have removed the occupation “professional dick sucker” from Wikipedia 200 times a day alone. He could have easily become the world’s most respected professional dick sucker in less time.
Among the highlights, he posted a hilariously fake discharge certificate to explain why he wasn’t in the Marines and tried to prove he was a bail bondsman with a shirtless picture of himself carrying what looks like 2 pepper sprays, 3 cell phones, and 30 pounds of baby fat. This joke is going to be more cute than funny, but in The Jam Man’s case the proof really was mostly pudding.
To give you an idea of how difficult John Decyk was to outwit, one person offered him a $3500 purse if he showed up to fight. John Decyk asked “what kind of fag would want an expensive purse.” That’s how deep his knowledge of the sport was after “64 pro fights.”
How It Ended: Arrested
John’s fiance’s mother was involved in a court case against the world champion, and she Googled his name as research. This led her right into a forum devoted to fucking with him. She was only too excited to join in, and she soon teamed up with the Internet to turn him from laughing stock into crater. He was humiliated then arrested for a number of charges, one of which was fucking shooting a gun at his brother’s head.
2020 Update: In 2016 John did an interview where he was asked about this article and he claimed it was a lie that he was telling all these lies. I swear I’m not saying this just to protect our precious fun, but it’s possible the liar with a history of lying might be lying about the lies and he, in fact, fucking sucked and still sucks.
6. Craig Rehage
Long after it should have been possible to try something this stupid, a fight promoter in the midwest got a call from a welterweight fighter named Craig Rehage who claimed to be undefeated in 18 amateur bouts. Sensing bullshit, but still being quite lazy, the promoter booked him for a match at 170 pounds anyway. Craig called before the match and said he was at 178 pounds and simply couldn’t lose any more weight. When he showed up, he weighed 190 pounds. Also, he didn’t know how to fight. It’s like he showed up to an online date and she said, “You fat dumbshit. You lying, bee-sting-faced cautionary tale of drug abuse. What was your plan here? Claim to be Georges St-Pierre and hope things magically work out?” and he only heard the very last sentence.
A second promoter came forward with a near-exact story about Craig, and an Internet star was born. The MMA Underground Forum scrambled to find more information about him, and what they found was a gold mine of douchebaggery. Craig had invented stories about being the training partner or cousin of dozens of UFC fighters to try to get free t-shirts, had fake pro hockey and football careers, and had submitted himself as a sports celebrity to any page that would allow it. You know that satisfying feeling you get from seeing someone you hate fail? Imagine an entire community sharing in that together.
As their blissful mockery grew to critical mass, Craig himself joined the forum posing as a lawyer who didn’t personally know Craig but decided to take some time to verify all his outrageous claims. It was as convincing as a swarm of bees in a trenchcoat. Craig can barely spell his name and here he was attempting the same transparent deception from everyone’s first day on the Internet.
How It Ended: Arrested
Craig learned nothing from the time he spent fooling no one as the absent-minded lawyer that was NOT named Craig Rehage. So he tried the same trick in real life– he found himself in some trouble for stealing hockey equipment and decided to get back at one of the police officers by writing harassing letters to his own girlfriend as the police officer. It turns out it’s still a felony to falsify charges against a police officer even if it’s that police officer’s most easily solved case ever.
2020 Update: As far as I can tell, this guy just kept getting arrested for scams that never fooled anyone, but weren’t fun enough to be cataloged by an entire community of fight nerds.
5. Manny “The Hialeah Kid” Reyes, Jr.
Manny Reyes, Jr. competed in point Karate before he made the switch to MMA and became the UFC Lightweight Champion. This was shocking to the UFC and its fans since he had never had a single match in it or any organization. He was, however, one of the first to adapt Karate for Internet message boards like in this desperate plea to UFC referee “Big” John McCarthy:
“DO SOMETHING UFC….DO SOMETHING GAYFUCK MCCARTHY…….. I DARE YOU…….I DARE YOU……. PIECE OF SHIT…I HAVE NO RESPECT FOR YOU………YOUR MOTHER OR FATHER EITHER…..OUR MOTHER WAS A WHOAR AND YOUR FATHER WAS A FAG… LOL………..I’m laughing at you………Send me an Email Address…….Fag!”
By the time this master of persuasion was done karate chopping his keyboard, his Myspace page had so many belts he didn’t even know how to spell them all. Unfortunately, it takes exactly the same amount of time to claim you have a belt as it does for a search engine to prove you don’t. In this rocket age of technology, you can only be the world’s greatest fighter for 7 or 8 seconds at best. Which meant Manny wanted to look cool, but only to the stupidest people alive. Maybe it was a short-term plan to sleep with very dumb girls because he had a theory stupid people herpes could cure regular people herpes? It’s honestly hard to get into the mind of someone dumber than anyone any of us will ever meet.
Manny actually did go on to build a “real” MMA record including several fights in Lords FC. This is a strange promotion that only has two fights on each card: one with Manny winning against a made-up opponent, and another fight between two made-up opponents. Where we live, reality, he has two wins in King of the Cage, but no one has been able to stay awake through them to verify it. Manny seems clinically insane, and has claimed many times that these two wins over bad opponents with no experience and losing records made him… well, I’ll let him explain:
I am the #1 LW in MMA and I did Fight for KOTC….so I am the KOTC #1 CHAMPION……..
If Bob Hope were alive, he’d say that this fella knows less about belts than a pair of suspenders. Seriously, though: he’s clinically insane. When Manny Reyes, Jr. puts on pantyhose, he truly thinks he’s Miss Teen USA and gets pissed off he now has to change all his business cards.
Here’s a fun Manny story: He once had a heated disagreement with the actual UFC champ Jens Pulver. I’m not sure what started it, but Jens Pulver refused to back down from his position of not knowing who the fuck Manny Reyes, Jr. was.
How It Ended: Beaten to Undeath
Reyes continued to challenge many pro fighters and then call them cowards when they wouldn’t fly him out and pay him $10,000. He whined and bitched so much that you couldn’t tell if he was trying to land a fighting career or a Vagisil commercial. Eventually, lightweight contender Hermes Franca offered to fight him at AFC 10 for $1 with the rest of the purse going to Reyes, Jr.. If you were Manny, this would be right when your friends convinced you to apologize and save some dignity. Well, Manny’s only friend was a dwindling tube of dick cream and all it was saying was, “Think of all the me you could buy.”
When the two met in the ring, Hermes Franca didn’t set the world record for fastest knockout that night, but he only missed it by 30 seconds. Hermes pounded Manny Reyes out so quickly and easily that it looked like he was changing a disagreeable pillow case.
When they woke him up and explained what had happened to him, the now more mentally-challenged Reyes had the balls to say that it was a moral victory for him because Hermes used karate. This wasn’t accurate, but victims of head trauma often get their language centers scrambled. Manny was probably trying to ask his dick cream where it left the remote. Either way, you have to concede that the guy’s more determined to be a dipshit than the rest of the world is to fix him.
After the Hermes loss, he returned to inventing wins for himself over the Internet. No one was interested, so he got the idea to start a rumor that he had died! Here’s the problem: his ego couldn’t resist bragging about his popularity and imaginary world titles when he submitted the fake reports, so they read mostly like sarcasm. He scrambled to get anyone’s attention while he debunked the very rumor he started, but all he’d proven is that when the time comes, this goddamn idiot won’t even be able to die correctly.
2020 Update: Let me just Google hi– oh my god, this lunatic isn’t in jail? And he’s teaching Karate to gyms full of badly masked children during an airborne disease pandemic? Fuck.
4. Scott “Lionheart” Blevins
Tiny and insane Scott Blevins is an expert in something he thinks is called “Maui Thai” and claims to have been trained by “Renzin” and “Rocky” Gracie in Virginia. This is notable because there are so many r-named Gracies that teach jiu-jitsu it’s actually sort of an achievement to make up two and not accidentally pick a real one. Scott also claimed the UFC signed him to compete in their 135 pound division, which at the time, of course, did not exist.
With the size of a 4th grader and the fighting abilities of that 4th grader’s little sister, Blevins lost all his amateur fights before losing his first 13 professional fights, all of them in the first round, most of them in less than a minute. It’s possible that he’s worse at fighting than anyone will ever be at anything. Think about it scientifically: if there is a worse fighter on Earth, they would cease to be that moments into the testing process. It’s like trying to directly observe a quark– all you get for your troubles is a series of confusing paradoxes and an angry void that suddenly knows you’re gazing into it. What I’m saying is that Scott Blevins sucks so hard he defies our understandings of science.
How It Ended: Inside Out and Arrested
Before he could achieve his UFC dreams, Scott Blevins was arrested for several counts of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old. He has all kinds of stories to explain how he didn’t do it including a corrupt cop and a frame job by a different sex offender, but the one thing the great teachers Renzin and Rocky Gracie never taught him was how to properly tell a lie. His defense was so childlike and filled with holes that Scott Blevins forgot where he was and tried to lure his own words into a van with ice cream.
2020 Update: A few years ago he was thrown back in jail after he stabbed his roommate for trying to stop him from stabbing his girlfriend’s tires. So Scott’s still kind of pursuing his dream of being a fighter, but we should add two more losses to his record. At this point, the police in Indiana must use him to train cadets. They’ll never find a person more certain to be committing a crime but also just so fucking bad at fighting.
3. Sensei Mark Bailey
Five time shootfighter-of-the-year and former Navy SEAL Mark Bailey has led a hard life. He was a 27-time title-holder in The World Fighting Championship, but had to deal drugs to supplement his income since that’s not a real thing. This criminal activity landed him in prison, stripped of all his titles. Luckily for his cellmate, his prison stay was also imaginary. Why is Mark Bailey so dangerous? Because Navy SEALs are trained to control their violence, and Mark Bailey should have told you this earlier: he’s not a Navy SEAL at all. One might think there’s some truth to the drug part of his story, though.
Mark created a website to document his domination of the world of martial arts. He was undefeated, with almost all his fights ending via death. There were no eulogies for his fallen opponents, but the webmaster did produce this grim explanation: “Mark Bailey never intends to kill… but in some cases his striking strength is too powerful for a human body to withstand.” Mark Bailey isn’t even considered a heterosexual since everything he fucks is technically a puddle within seconds.
How It Ended: Starting From $0.33 New or Used at Amazon.com
The problem with Mark Bailey is that all the imaginary fights he’s been in have given him very real brain damage. Noah’s Ark has fewer plot holes than this guy’s history. His made-up fight record reads like an idiot trying to spell UFC fighter names and he physically looks like someone made a pussy out of cookie dough and balanced it on chopsticks. His entire existence was debunked by the Internet in less time than it took him to accidentally kill “Hinso Grasie” and “Kent Sharmrock” in underground kickboxing matches.
Nevertheless, he published an autobiography called My Life’s Fight. I ordered a copy and the shipping-and-handling charge was $3.66 more than the cost of the book itself. Probably because touching it gives your hand Down’s Syndrome. Oddly enough, after thousands of fights, he finally had one in front of people in 2008 at the main event of Skip Hall’s Dixie Throwdown IV in Alabama. He fought a man named Dave LaFlamme, and I have some things to say about this “fight.”
Let me first describe the deadliest striker on the planet, Mark Bailey. Mark Bailey holds his head and hands perfectly still and tries to block jabs with a double slap like a child in a high chair who wants more chocolate. I have some combat sports experience, and if Mark didn’t have 87 wins by spinal paralysis on his fight record, I’d swear this guy had never even sparred before. As he circled, Mark’s face was holding a festival of vulnerability, and his rapidly slowing love handles seemed to be saying, “God, nobody told us there would be all this circling.” LaFlamme answered back with a few not-quite-punches before lowering his head into a choke. I’m not saying the fight was fake, but if it wasn’t, someone should tell these gay gentlemen that there’s a crowd of Alabamans that can see them slow dancing.
Not everyone sees Mark as an obvious, ridiculous fraud. Why here’s a letter from “K. Uchideh” a real person from Korea who wrote to Mark after he visited his or her school, home, or dojo:
“Thank you so much for the autographs that you took the time to sign, even though your hand was broken. Your style is unbelievable! I can see why you have won every cage championship match that you have entered. I am anxiously awaiting your next training video and want to see you fight again soon. Congratulations on winning the World Shootfighter of the Year title for the 5th straight year.”
K. Uchideh – Korea
2020 Update: Aside from making fun of his bullshit book for our hot dog comedy website and a single video of him endorsing some kind of holographic wristband you stick to yourself for energy, there’s no trace of Sensei Mark Bailey on the Internet. But kudos to 8eight Holographic Magic Bracelets for landing that endorsement from a sloppy hillbilly who is literally only known for lying about murder.
2. Rafiel Torre
Let me start with a totally true story. A man named Ralph Bartel was invited to a secret underground martial arts tournament in the woods… a competition so secret and exclusive that one might almost call it pointless if one were stupid enough to think it happened.
Despite its secret underground nature, one reporter got wind of the story. It happened when Ralph Bartel called the reporter and asked for a ride there. It’s possible that the tournament was only secret because no one had ever thought to tell a reporter about it until that moment.
For the trip, Ralph brought two bags: one full of camping equipment and one secret bag of mysterious contents. Ralph asked to be dropped off– he had to make the rest of the journey on foot, alone. The reporter knew enough about secret underground martial arts tournaments to fill in the blanks, and like your mother, every blank was filled with Ninja.
Ralph said to come back in three days. Well, three of our days. Time works differently when you pass through the Karate Portal.
The reporter arrived back at the rendezvous point three days later. Ralph, mighty Ralph, was waiting without a mark on him from his three days of secret battle. He was holding one bag of camping equipment and one bag-sized World Champion karate trophy. Ralph had done it! The reporter was surprised to find out that a forest full of dead martial artists has no odor. Did the coyotes already eat them? And if so, wouldn’t they now be ninjas? Knowing he was unravelling the edge of something big, he drove the secret champion home.
Maybe even more absurd than all of that is the fact that the reporter bought it. Ralph, now a world champion, went on to invent other stories about his Brazilian father who trained him in jiu-jitsu. In fact, he was so good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that he decided his name should be Rafiel Torre, a name 710% more Jitsuey than Ralph. These and other lies got him an invitation to the first Abu Dhabi world submission grappling tournament. To say he got his ass handed to him is almost physiologically accurate. He was submitted and eliminated in under a minute.
When people questioned him about how he lost so badly and wait, also didn’t actually have a Brazilian dad, he adjusted his story so that he was now a master of ju-jitsu, the Japanese style that isn’t very good. Oh, and he didn’t know where you guys got all that Brazilian dad stuff from. The nice thing about Rafiel’s lies were that they were fluid enough to flow around most scrutiny. Because of that, and an exhaustive series of apologies, he remained a part of the MMA community for a long time. He even won his first pro fight at King of the Cage 7: Wet and Wild. Note that when I say “won,” I mean that he most likely paid a guy named Ioka Tianuu to gently place his leg into a kneebar. There were infants locked in cars outside the Soboba Indian Casino that night that noticed there was something fishy about the fight.
How It Ended: Tragedy
During sessions of group sex, Rafiel and another man’s wife fell for each other. All it took was her thumb up his ass while he poked Hepatitis B into a fat stranger to tell them it was love. Working backwards from a Knot’s Landing script, Rafiel and the woman hatched a plan to kill her husband Bryan and take his life insurance. But since treachery is hard, they changed the plan to just asking UFC fighter and former marine Gerald Strebendt if he’d kill Bryan for $10,000.
Gerald said no.
Well, shit. Plan B: Rafiel waited until Gerald had probably forgotten about that and went ahead and killed Bryan himself. Ironically, with jiu jitsu. He covered up the crime by hiding the body in the back of Bryan’s truck in an Albertson’s parking lot and claiming self defense when what must be the world’s greatest detective found the body.
The community was very nearly shocked! They knew Rafiel killed a lot of world champion martial artists during his jungle tournament days, but cold-blooded murder? I guess we can all take a lesson from it– if someone has lied about everything in their life and they’re leaving an orgy with your wife and your life insurance policy, don’t be too quick to trust them.
2020 Update: Not a ton of updates on the murderer serving a life sentence. Maybe in 2030 there will be some fun “Rafiel” news!
1. Frank Dux
Frank Dux was a spy and a master of ninjutsu, which is just a Japanese word for somersaulting megaspy. He was the best. He trained under a shidoshi whose name was only coincidentally the name of a James Bond villain. He was in a covert branch of the military so secret that even our military didn’t know about him. He doesn’t exist so hard that birds shit right through him. But someone did know about him: a shadowy society of martial artists who run a tournament called The Kumite. They invited Frank to enter which was the stupidest thing they ever did, because the CIA or whoever never trained him how to not kill everyone’s dicks.
From 1975 to 1980, he was the undefeated Full Contact Kumite World Heavy Weight Champion. He had 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, a number too stupid to be fake. He set four world records in the same tournament including “Fastest Recorded Kick with Knockout: 72 mph.” I guess the Kumite Athletic Commission figured it was okay to keep radar guns pointed at the fighters at all times since Frank removed most of their gonads before the long term effects of radar exposure could manifest. In fact, he punched so many dicks through their sacred walls that city temple inspectors shut them down for code violations.
The best thing about Frank’s lies is that they’re too impossible to even give the benefit of the doubt. Fifty six wins in a single elimination tournament implies magnitudes of participants more than the population of the Earth. And the idea that each body part on each fighter is being clocked for speed by ancient Chinese radar guns is something a four-year-old would explain to be unlikely to a 3-year-old.
Also, suspiciously, the organization that held the Kumite seemed to share a home address with Frank Dux, and the trophy they gave him was the same trophy he suspiciously paid for himself. Think about that: The Kumite is so secret the only paper trail leads to Frank Dux, professional secret agent. That means the other fighters, while obviously not very good at fighting, are unbelievably good at being secret. Why, if Frank Dux hadn’t written a book about them and bought himself that trophy, I doubt I’d have even believed they existed.
How It Ended: Awesomely
In 1988, Frank’s extremely true story was made into the film Bloodsport which is still Jean-Claude Van Damme’s and possibly the world’s best movie. Dux worked on the film as the fighting coordinator where he taught Van Damme how to properly get punched in the face for several minutes and then win by spin kick. Jean-Claude would go on to use these fighting techniques exclusively for two decades.
Years later, Dux and Van Damme worked together on the story of The Quest. It was a film like Bloodsport only with Bloodsport elements. Dux took Van Damme to court because Dux apparently had a big gross revenue deal for his “Story By” credit. In the film industry, this type of arrangement is almost as common as an actual ninja spy holding a trophy for Best Ninja Spy. To see both of these things in the same place is like finding a human vagina on your unicorn: literally fucking incredible.
Frank Dux never managed to produce evidence of this amazing agreement since the documents were in a box that was destroyed by a fire. Fitting in perfectly with his life of the fantastic, this fire was a magical fire that destroyed document boxes and nothing else. It sounds ridiculous now, but imagine you were a judge presiding over a case between the cocaine-filled star of Double Impact and an actual, real-life superninja who controls fire. That judge said exactly what you would say: “Pay the man, Timecop.”
2020 Update: One thing you can never trust is information about Frank Dux, but I personally have some. Aside from him hassling Cracked to take this article down, I’ve dated one woman who told me how Frank Dux creepily hit on her at her ninjutsu dojo. I’ve also purchased one autographed headshot of Frank Dux from a San Francisco spy shop where the clerk had no less than five stories of Frank Dux being a total asshole. As far as I can tell, he had been waiting his entire life to complain about Frank Dux to the first person who asked about him.
And while I have never had the chance to tell Frank Dux how his weirdly compelling shittiness has touched my life, I have personally thanked two of the people who made Bloodsport for making Bloodsport. Paulo Tocha, the Muay Thai guy who had a gentleman’s rib-smashing contest in the middle of he and Jean-Claude’s fight, gave me some unorthodox round kick tips in a Hollywood jiu jitsu school, and Stan Bush pretended he didn’t hear me when I requested “Kumite, Kumite” at a San Diego Comic-Con show. So this asshole, liar ninja helped create some wonderful memories. Thanks, Frank!
Special thanks to Sherdog.com, Eddie Doty, Bullshido.org, the Underground Forum, Paulo Tocha, Stan Bush, and Frank Dux.
Fuck this nightmare book. Hi, I’m the Internet’s Seanbaby, handsome humorist from beloved comedy website 1900hotdog.com, and I’m telling you right now CETO’S NEW FRIENDS is, without question, some bullshit. I understand this sentence will be used against us if humanity is ever on trial for being too goddamn stupid to live, but this book was written by a certified public accountant who wants children to know the fun and wonder of alien abductions.
The accountant author, who sucks at at least one of those things, is named Leah A. Haley. Leah A. Haley is a series of white letters written almost exclusively in calligraphed serif italics. It’s the first name on a reservation list for a maskless COVID-19 brunch. When Leah A. Haley applies for a change of address, a government employee sees “Leah A. Haley” on the form and stamps “DOES NOT FUCK” on it.
What Leah A. Haleydoes do is believe in aliens. Most alien nutjobs are incurious, troubled people who wish they could solve their sad problems with star magic, and CETO’S NEW FRIENDS is like all these emotional disorders having a nuclear meltdown. Please hear me and believe me when I say: Fuck this crazy bitch and her crazy book.
The dedication is “For Our Children,” but if you can show me a book less safe for children, I’ll say, “HOW TO COVER YOURSELF IN MOOSE URINE DURING MATING SEASON FOR KIDS? I think you made up this fake book to ruin the point I was trying to make.” My copy of CETO’S NEW FRIENDS was previously owned by the Sandusky Library, which kept track of their books by putting little price tag stickers on them and then not even coming close to scratching them off after they were returned. So by counting the half-torn stickers and claw marks, I know this was checked out five times before they took it out of circulation. So that’s at least five people in Ohio who are objectively unfit parents and whom we also can’t trust when the visitors arrive.
The story opens with Ceto on a faraway planet. This is all we are told about him. Leah A. Haley doesn’t know what the planet is called or any of Ceto’s customs we might interpret as virtues, hobbies, or personality. He’s just from space, and that’s all Leah A. Haley needs to know to trust him with the brains and orifices of her children.
Annie and Seth live on Earth, and this is what illustrator Lisa Dusenberry, a “curious and open-minded” UFO investigator, thinks children from Earth look like. The back of the book says she often works with abductees to illustrate their experiences, which might explain why the children look like they were drawn by someone whose main body of work is sketches of space monsters undressing lonely people.
There is fucking nothing to do in space, so Ceto came to Earth to watch Annie and Seth play netless volleyball. The leading causes of death on this planet are disease and violence, and this idiot lady thinks aliens are going to just send their babies millions of light years to pointlessly float through our backyards. Are Ceto’s parents back home telepathically saying, “It’s worth the star risk, lover! Our Ceto has to experience Earth sports!” There’s not a backyard in America where this alien wouldn’t be shot out of the air by seven kinds of firearms, and the signals we broadcast into space make this very clear.
Oh, good. Ceto gets creepier.
These kids seem old enough to know they should at least go inside and ask their parents if it’s okay to go into space with their new friend Ceto. I don’t care how reassuringly featureless a creature’s pubis is, no parent is going to let it take their kids off-planet after one game of marbles. So here’s where the story ends, right?
I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Jesus fucking Christ. CETO’S NEW FRIENDS was produced by two women who, together, looked at this picture and said, “This is perfect. This is exactly how safe children should look in a story about happy things.” This is 100% the first thing I would behead with a shovel if it was walking next to the animated remains of Osama bin Laden. What the fuck went wrong in Leah A. Haley‘s life that made her think this is cute? If these goddamn horrors ever start talking with their mouths, the first thing they’re going to say is, “We are the ghosts of abortions. We are here for your skin.”
Ceto’s got a fucking Playschool spaceship console. Is that really how you steer the thing, Ceto, or is this just what you let the stupid Earth children play with? You don’t really honk on 700 giant plastic baby-colored buttons to navigate the stars, do you?
Think of the danger these children are in. Let’s ignore the obvious — how there’s no reason to think Ceto will return them home, or if he would even know which fucking big dumb button would take them there anyway. They are breathing in microscopic creatures from a different galaxy and smearing the same all over Ceto’s toddler console. Do we really think this race of super powerful beings are going to stay benevolent when Ceto brings back Annie’s head lice and Seth’s hand, foot, and mouth disease? Or as Ceto’s people will call it “horblax, foot and morblax disease alpha 7.” This is an act of intergalactic biological war. I mean, read a book on intergalactic biological warfare, Leah A. Haley, you dingbat cow.
Leah A. Haley‘s imagination conjured up three activities the children could do in space and two of them were fucking around with props from an uninspired 1950s sci-fi movie. Was this worth a whole page of a 28 page book– Annie and Seth watching bar graphs on Ceto’s shitty console?
You really went all out to entertain these kids, Ceto. “I AM SPEAKING TO YOU WITH MY EYES, EARTH YOUNGLINGS. SORRY, I DON’T GET ANY CHANNELS THIS FAR FROM MY HOME. I GUESS YOU CAN WATCH STATIC WHILE I CLEANSE MY BORBLAX EXCAVATION TOOLS. AH, MY TRANSLATO-TRON SAYS YOU CALL THEM BUTTHOLES.”
So Ceto brings them home, presumably hours later. Maybe days? Months? He gives them the gift of “a purple rock” which will definitely do nothing to help convince their parents they were in space this whole time. I don’t think you have to be a parent to imagine how pissed off you’d be if your kids vanished and came back with just the dumbest fucking UFO story. A story just dumb as all shit. If you were kicked in the head by a donkey, this UFO story is what you’d tell your doctor to let him know the current treatment wasn’t working. Leah A. Haley writes like aliens took turns shitting in her brain as a space prank.
“Our new friend let us press random buttons on an unlabeled starship console! We killed a moon! We saw a green line! What do you mean you don’t believe us? This unremarkable chunk of quartz proves our story to be true!”
Why? To harvest the beings you planted in them? To check in and see if their faces ever grew into human shapes? What was gained or learned from any of this? What idle beings would bend the laws of time and space and risk interplanetary war to give two mute children the galaxy’s most boring spaceship ride? This book is the squarest, dullest moron’s lack of foresight and imagination laid bare. This bitch has nothing going on in her mind other than an obsession with make-believe. I firmly believe if an ice cream truck driver drove into Leah A. Haley’s living room and screamed “I need baby teeth for my chrono-drive,” this idiot kook would give him all her children and proudly write a book called How I Raised Time Dentists.
In 1967, Birdman debuted on Saturday morning TV. He was powered by the sun, written by confused idiots, and brought to life by even more confused foreign animators. As a nerd of some renown, I’ve seen over seven cartoons, and the original Birdman is without question my all-time favorite. You are very lucky to be reading the first installment of Birdman Theater, a Pullitzer-eligible series where I describe episodes of Birdman to you, the hot ladies of 1-900-HOTDOG. Now, as soon as I stop fucking around, we can start Birdman Theater Episode 0001: Birdman Episode 03A: The Quake Threat!
Out of respect to the original writers, no dialog will be altered in these Birdman scenes.
Like every Birdman episode, “The Quake Threat” starts in Birdman’s volcano base with him getting an emergency call from Falcon 7. Two important things to know right away are that Falcon 7 is voiced by a man clinically unable to convey urgency and Birdman has no secret identity or hobbies. He is never putting down a book or rushing a woman out of his volcano who only knows him as everyday test pilot “Birdley Mantooth.” The only thing he is ever doing at the start of an episode is sitting here and waiting for his computer to turn on. We have no reason to believe he’s wearing a costume at all. We could very well be looking at his nude body.
Birdman cartoons cram an entire three act structure into seven minutes, so the plot is usually developed by Falcon 7 explaining who the bad guy is, what he’s doing, and what he wants. “The Quake Threat” is no exception. Professor Kairoff has an earthquake beam and he is going crazy with it– just pointlessly making earthquakes. Falcon 7 worries he’ll use it to demand ransom from the world or loan it out to other people who will demand ransom from the world. Birdman has a lot of trouble following along, and Falcon 7 seems pretty cranky that so much of his workday is being spent explaining the downsides of earthquake crime to Birdman. Once he finally understands, it occurs to him:
It’s a criminal madman causing earthquakes for no reason and Birdman’s main concern is him potentially giving his earthquake ray to the wrong person, and this seems like a great opportunity to mention Birdman is stupid as shit.
Falcon 7 has no idea where to find Professor Kairoff, but Birdman figures he’ll just follow the shockwaves and leaves screaming his catchphrase, which is his name. By the time he gets into the sky, the writers realize Birdman can fly and shoot lasers and neither of those abilities allow him to follow the shockwaves of earthquakes. Or, now that they think about it, the shockwaves from a ray that caused the earthquakes? Jesus, what are they going to do? Wait, hold up, Birdman has a “solar band,” a device used only this once during the show’s two year span, which is a bracelet that lights up when you’re going towards the source of an earthquake ray shockwave. Honestly, it’s amazing whoever sold this thing to Birdman wasn’t fucking with him. Real quick, I reverse engineered the schematics:
We are finally introduced to Professor Kairoff who is watching Birdman flying toward his base. If you know anything about old cartoons, you already know he’s got a real-time, full color security camera that can film anyone, anywhere. He knew someone might be coming, so he was scanning sector “Sky,” coordinates “Fucking Middle Of The.” Also, Kairoff is a weird little gremlin in a pink unitard with red panties and he’s been living alone so long he talks to his robots. He lives in the volcano next door to Birdman, and thinks Avenger’s name is Eagle. Most writers wouldn’t risk the confusion of having one main character forget the name of another main character, but Birdman doesn’t give a shit. He’s lucky if he stays the same color for a whole episode.
Notice the evil genius didn’t say, “Oh, shit, he must have traced my earthquake ray shockwaves with some kind of, I don’t know, solar band?” Do you know what this means? It means the writers of this, the stupidest goddamn show, have written a genius villain dumber than themselves! Let’s see if that ever ends up being a problem for him as we continue the story.
Kairoff tells his robot “Gorga” to take two metal men up the elevator to dispose of Birdman. These voiceless “metal men” are automatons so disposable even the writers and animators forget about them several times a scene, but for some reason Kairoff gave this one, Gorga, a name. Why? What makes Gorga special? The answer lies in his schematics:
Gorga and the two metal men he selected using a decision protocol you or I might call “love,” emerge from the mountain and immediately shoot Birdman and Avenger in the heads. To their credit, no one could have predicted their mitten claws would shoot lasers. Also, due to budget limitations, they can only change direction in flight once every six episodes.
I know you’re worried, but don’t be. Both of them are fine. Weirdly fine. It’s almost as if no one involved in this from the writers to the animators to the fictional characters seemed to care if these “force rays” work. I mean, one of them hit an ordinary bird square in the face. Gorga, if your laser can’t kill an ordinary bird, why bother shooting it? Because your best friend asked you to? Gorga, you may be a robot, but here you are teaching me what it is to be human. Anyway, the unharmed Birdman easily obliterates Gorga. Wait, oh no! Not Gorga!!
It might be because I’m having trouble dealing with what happened to Gorga, but this next part is confusing. Avenger is now in the clutches of one of the other metal men. I have no idea why this majestic eagle, flying hundreds of feet above only a moment ago, would dive down in the middle of a battle to nest in a robot’s ray-blasting robot claws, but here we are.
And now I know I must be crazy, because as soon as Birdman sees his amazing partner being used as an eagle shield, he says “DROP THAT BIRD YOU BUCKET OF BOLTS,” and full-power shoots the fucking shit out of his own bird. Birdman will absolutely kill you through a hostage. He loves justice so much he will pay for your robot execution with the life of his own dearest friend.
There’s no reason Avenger should be alive. Eagles are about 10 pounds of hollow bones and feathers and this one has eaten direct hits from two kinds of laser beams in five seconds. I have a theory that one of Birdman’s writers truly hates eagles and he brutally murders Avenger in the first draft of every script, but before they send it off a second Birdman writer comes in and adds “he doesn’t really die” in Korean.
The final metal man grabs a giant boulder and throws it at Birdman, demonstrating an absurd strength less plausible than tension in a story about a laser-proof eagle. Birdman easily catches it and throws it back, a defiance of physics so deranged Gorga and the other destroyed metal man spontaneously reform so they can be killed again.
Please know that two different characters made mention of there being exactly three metal men, so these are not extra robots from off frame– this is simply far beyond the number of things the writers and animators can keep track of. Once more than zero things are on screen, it’s anyone’s guess where they are or which ones died. But I’m sorry to say, this time Gorga really is gone.
Kairoff’s robots, the ones who shot things at our heroes with no chance of hurting them, didn’t work and their remains have already vanished, but the evil professor has one more idea. He turns on his intercom and says, and I quote:
Birdman, in his outside voice without guarding his mouth, says to his bird, who doesn’t speak English or understand the concept of deception:
Birdman, who you’ll remember is so stupid, gets into the elevator which is also a cage and is immediately squashed in a trap. Well, not immediately. First Kairoff makes a joke. Well, not exactly a joke. He laughs while he taunts him. Well, not taunt exactly. More like a welcome, and then the same welcome again, but with a laugh in the middle. Does that make sense? No? Well, then welcome to Birdman. Ha ha ha, welcome… indeed.
Why would he say this? Is he mad from loneliness? Heartbroken after seeing his precious Gorga die twice? Written by careless hacks? However Kairoff came to be, he’s the best. And when Birdman demands to be let loose, he replies with words that seem like they were formed by poking the brain of a cartoon writer during an autopsy.
There’s nothing better than Birdman dialog. It’s perfect. It’s like the producers were throwing cliches together and hoping for mediocre, but got everything a little bit wrong to form a masterpiece no competence or sanity could have created. For instance, Birdman responds to this by saying, “I SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS. AND I’VE BEEN AWAY FROM THE RAYS OF THE SUN FOR TOO LONG. MY STRENGTH… IS… EBBING.”
This is the second act of all Birdman stories– the part where he runs out of solar power. Birdman’s weakness is that he can’t fight at night, underwater, inside, or when it’s partly cloudy, and he never remembers any of this. Here he is once again caught off guard by the very basic premise of his super power. The only thing dumber than a solar-powered hero walking into a dark elevator to battle a villain who can defeat him by refusing to open it is what happens next.
Kairoff turns on his video conference machine to brag to three men about how he caught Birdman who yells to himself:
No they’re absolutely not, Birdman. That’s clearly a reporter doing a story on a ventriloquist who helps the police solve supernatural crimes. Did he call the wrong number? Is Birdman looking at a different monitor? Are the leaders of world nations what everyone sees during the last moments of an elevator crushing?
This is all standard Birdman adventure right here– everything is crazy, and he’s trapped and powerless as a result of his unimaginable stupidity. To recap, his plan was to tell the bad guy, “I’m pretending to be a bad guy,” and lock himself in a cage. Luckily, whenever this happens, Avenger turns into an invincible rescue machine. He knows Birdman’s dumb ass is somewhere needing sunlight, so he rips through an air vent and goes nuts, tricking the “genius” into blowing skylights into his own roof with wild laser gun shots. It would be a weird way to handle a bird loose in your home even if you didn’t have a guileless idiot right behind you loudly narrating how your bad decisions are helping him.
Two seconds of sunlight recharges all the power Birdman lost from eleven seconds of being inside, and he breaks free! Kairoff and his last remaining metal man throw some lasers at him, but shooting at a full-powered Birdman this late in the story is like throwing a teddy bear into an orgy. Maybe it only bounces off, but it’s more likely you’re about to see a soft, helpless thing get destroyed by a lunatic’s violent penetration.
Birdman easily blocks their rays with his solar shield, a tiny energy field no one has ever shot around in the history of television. Then he leaves.
I’m serious. He decided he needs more solar power (while literally bathing in glowing sunlight), so he flew out through a hole in the roof. He called a timeout in the middle of a fight for a plainly unnecessary reason, and then flew right back around. Professor Kairoff was so confused by the whole thing this is what he said when Birdman re-entered:
I guess he figured he wasn’t coming back? He’s a pro, though; so he recovers quickly and grabs a lever. He warns, “ONE MOVE OF THIS LEVER AND I CAN START A QUAKE IN YOUR COUNTRY’S CAPITAL!” This is another strange quirk of Birdman in that it’s very obviously America but they always refer to Washington D.C. as “your country’s capital.” I think they were hedging their bets so if Vietnam won and moved the capital to Hanoi this cartoon wouldn’t age into something ridiculous.
You already know from earlier how Birdman responds to hostage situations. That’s right– double goddamn solar beams. He annihilates this little fucker. Kairoff’s tiny body is ground zero for 200 megatons of solar destruction. You do not threaten Birdman’s nation’s capital, wherever such a place might be, with an earthquake lever!
This isn’t a murder, though. Birdman hit Kairoff with the kind of explosion that only affects solid rock, sex robots, and earthquake machines. In fact, Kairoff seems completely uninjured. What is he? And why? Did a bat crash into a sperm bank? Is he a star vampire? Is he an ordinary Turkish child? And damn it, Birdman, was the secret to beating him just flying in and shooting him this whole time!?
Hold on, Birdman, you don’t have the authority to do any of this? And y-you know that’s the elevator out, right? You’re trapping him in the… Birdman, that’s how you get out of this place. He’s twenty inches tall and can very clearly fit through the bars, Birdman! And you’re leaving? You’re putting him in the elevator he uses to get in and out of his own home and leaving!? To get the same cops who asked you to take care of this guy!? Birdman, y– oh, I guess he’s gone.
“Rad, Dad, that’s bad!” my 10-year-old grandson exclaimed. Those are the opening words to 1996’s HOW TO BE A WAY COOL GRANDFATHER. Verne Steen had handed a homemade toy to his grandson, a child unable to tell the difference between his father and grandfather and screaming stilted slang from the wrong decade. They are the words that inspired Verne to think, “I will publish a book to teach other grandparents to be this way cool.” It’s a stupid tale made mostly of holes which, as you’ll see, makes it the book’s perfect origin story.
First off, Verne wants to make sure you know what this book is not. It will not teach you how to MTV rock ‘n’ roll or Internet fad or ass eating, whatever those things are. It is a nothing-fancy collection of crafting projects for boys, that’s fucking it, and Verne spends 24 pages apologizing for it in his introduction. He has a section called “My Chauvinism” about how pissed you must be if you’re a grandma reader and how you can cure it by fucking yourself. He mentions many, many times how nothing about any of this is “cool,” it’s just a dumb name and you should maybe just move on from the title he chose, okay? Whatever this book is, Verne needs us to know it’s absolutely not going to be cool. Here’s the tail end of it if you want your expectations properly lowered:
So now that you understand this is pretty male-oriented and honestly not super cool, let’s get started!
Verne did as much as he could to keep us from expecting “way cool,” but this is an elderly man carving homemade kazoos out of drinking straws and calling them “tooters.” He’s just making garbage more noisy. If making garbage more noisy was cool, Creed would have a gong player and he would fuck.
I have no notes on this one. Making a gun out of a clothespin is something way cool MacGyver would do to foil a K-Mart robbery, which is also a way cool point of reference a grandfather might have.
A slingshot is a nice upgrade to what you’ve already armed the children with, but I’m starting to wonder what activities require this many projectile weapons. Is Verne tricking his grandkids into guarding his bird feeder from squirrels? Is he secretly preparing them to defend points of entry against an FBI raid? I just think it’s suspicious that two of grandpa’s first three ideas are weapons and the one that isn’t fucking sucks. Let’s see what his next “cool” project is…
Of course. Verne only owns three mugs. One says “Ask Me About My Grandkids!” The other says, “Ask Me About My Grandkids’ Missing Eyes!” And the last one says, “If You Can Read This You’re Being Hunted by My One-Eyed Grandkids!” The moment you lose sight of Verne’s grandchildren in a JoAnn’s Fabric, you can be sure they’re behind you loading a knitting needle into an improvised harpoon gun.
Verne, they’re playing in the backyard, not escaping a POW camp. They don’t need a seventeenth primitive hunting tool. I’m sure you and 1996 didn’t agree a lot on child safety regulations, but you can’t just carve everything in a kid’s life into a murder weapon and call it a book. This is getting crazy. Is he trying to thin these kids out so it’s easier to remember all their names? They fucking have enough weapons, Verne!
Okay, good. HOW TO BE A WAY COOL GRANDFATHER isn’t entirely dedicated to helping children shoot each other. This is a sonic weapon instead of a projectile one. Why would a kid need a noisy whistle used to frighten your enemies before you kill them? Well, for one, it opens up a dialog between you and your grandchildren about the power of intimidation in a land war. I don’t know exactly how old Verne is, but if you asked an australopithecus to write a how-to book, it would look identical to this.
At a certain point in your toy-making process, one of your grandchildren is going to ask you to stop and look down at the lawn full of deadly weapons you’ve made and say, “Grandpa, I think a big part of you is still back in Vietnam.”
Jesus Christ, Verne. This one isn’t even pretending to be a toy. What are we fucking doing here? Whatever you’re arming these children for, they’re ready!
V-Verne? What the fuck am I looking at here? Toothpick Springer? So it shoots toothpicks… wait, burning toothpicks? You’re just making Blair Witch shit that explodes into fiery splinters for your 6-year-old grandchildren? This is crazy, but I have to say, it’s also cool as shit.
You might be wondering why a child soldier book so plainly written by a traumatized survivor of a man-hunting safari would include a Safety Concerns section with each project. Wouldn’t anyone with even a passing interest in safety write a book on literally anything else? Look, I can’t decipher the full mystery of Cool Grandpa Verne. But I can let you know that most of the Safety Concerns sections look like this:
In conclusion, teach your children to turn trash into weapons; it should be fine. And upon reflection, this book was written 24 years ago… a lot of Verne’s grandkids had to have killed sixty or seventy men by now. Okay, bye!
